Programming

Many moons ago I was tasked to port a curses based mainframe application to Java Swing 1.1 API - this was my first experience with Java and I was enthused by the somewhat large library API that was available, by default.

However, at the time, Swing sucked. It sucked big-time.

I had used C++ Builder and was used to the Borland GUI classes which laid things out in a logical order - Swing at the time, just added feature upon feature and it was not simple to make a simple dialog box - you had to code for 20 million different parts of it before it would render.

In the end, due to time pressures, we got someone in that was more familair with Java to handle the front-end while I concentrated on the SOA back-end. Ocassionally I would hear him also cursing the swing api / way of doing things.

As I've said - many moons have passed. I've ventured into other aspects of programming - briefly writing some Java servlet (which to my surprise, seemed fairly straight-forward). However, recently I've been working with the Java Spring framework.

I'm impressed. It seems very well thought out, fairly robust and reasonably straight-forward on how to perform tasks. The major problems I've ran into is the "How do I" aspect of the tool set that I've been using (Eclipse, Hibernate, Swing api etc). I expect these types of problems.

One of the issues I do have with Spring, is that aside from their fairly robust web site (http://www.springframework.org), I'd love to see lesss tersely written simple examples. An example of what I'm looking for would be like what Yahoo has done with their YUI JS toolkit. As I learn more I'll try to post things that I've found.